the name is how our middle daughter used to introduce me to some of her friends (sad but true!)

Monday, September 29, 2014

september 2014 books

more book
stuff:

Silence (Shusaku
Endo): Our latest Book Group book. It’s a profound, disturbing, harrowing
novel about a 17th century Portuguese priest in Japan at the time of
great persecution of the small Christian community. Superbly-written and hugely
thought-provoking… at various times, I felt as if I was reading extracts from
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters or Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”
(compelling, tragic and unrelenting?). Tough, but brilliant!The Leavetaking
(John McGahern): I’m a great lover of McGahern’s writing and this novel
simply re-affirmed such a view. It’s about a young schoolteacher in Dublin and
is set during his last day in the school (he was about to be formally fired for
having married a divorced non-Catholic woman during a leave of absence year). The
book is in two parts – both, essentially, flashbacks. The first covers the
teacher's childhood up to the moment of his mother's death and the second to
how he met his wife, and how the church authorities terminate his employment. The
book is apparently a close reflection on McGahern's own experiences of being
dismissed from his teaching post in the early 1960s. Birthday Letters
(Ted Hughes): This book of poems was published in 1998, 35 years after his
wife’s (Sylvia Plath) suicide. Up until that time, Hughes had said/written
virtually nothing about their life together. I started reading this a little
time ago and, frankly (as with much poetry!), struggled to come to terms with
it. By chance, my great friend Bob Fieldsend had been reading the book in
conjunction with Erica Wagner’s “Ariel’s Gift” (see below) and had found it
very helpful. He duly lent me his copy… and it’s been a revelation (which
probably says an awful lot about some of my previous endeavours to appreciate
poetry!). I came to really love Hughes’s eloquence in expressing his emotions,
frustrations, fears, sadness and tenderness about his life with Plath. The
result is a simply beautiful, intimate, dark, painful book of poems, published
35 years after Plath’s death (and just before he died in 1998) and (mainly)
addressed to her… and dedicated to their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.
Many critics, it seems, chose to believe that Hughes’s previous reluctance to
write or talk about his wife’s death was an admission of his guilt in their
relationship… but it seems that the reality is far more complex. Ariel’s Gift
(Erica Wagner): See above! I think Wagner’s book is absolutely excellent –
an academic commentary that provided me with both information and insight about
Hughes’s and Plath’s lives and their writing. Sylvia Plath only really received
recognition as a poet following her death by suicide in 1963. Plath had first
attempted to kill herself in 1953, in the USA before she knew Hughes; this was
followed by a breakdown and subsequent electro-convulsive therapy.Her life seems to have been hugely tormented
(even haunted?) by her domineering father who died in 1940 (it seems that Hughes
became her father figure in the early years of their relationship), when she
was eight and by her resentment of her mother.
Note: tragedy seems to have marked Ted Hughes’s
relationships, indirectly or directly – he’d begun an affair with Assia Wevill,
not long before he and Plath separated, and she too committed suicide in 1969
(she gassed herself along with her daughter by Hughes); and his son Nicholas
hanged himself in 2009, aged 47. Bundle! (Mark
Fieldsend): The author is the son of great friend Bob Fieldsend (and Christine!)
- who, somewhat bizarrely, I’ve already referred to above. It’s a book about
young twenty-somethings, it’s set in Thame (where we used to live) and, at
least in part, it’s about celebrity status. Of course, me being a grumpy old
man, I rather detest anything related to the word “celebrity” these days (not to mention some twentysomethings!). I
have some reservations about the way the story unfolded - I anticipated the way the
book might end about three-quarters through it, but convinced myself that that
would be too predictable. I was wrong, my initial thoughts proved correct! But
this sounds far too negative – the book’s very readable, frequently ridiculous and
funny.

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About Me

Married to Moira with three daughters (Ruth, Hannah and Alice) and six grandchildren (Ursula, Jemima, Rosa, Dan, Iris and Mikey). Former architect and also worked with young people in education in recent years... now just a retired slacker.